Jamie Hawkesworth made his debut with portraits of people passing through Preston’s brutalist bus station (published first as a pamphlet, Preston Is My Paris, in 2010, and later a book, Preston Bus Station, in 2015). That early work catapulted Hawkesworth into the fashion world, where he continues to shoot campaigns for global brands. The body of work that makes up The British Isles, his current solo exhibition, seems to pick up where Preston Bus Station left off, offering enigmatic and elusive vignettes of the nation.
A dozen large-scale prints hang at Huxley-Parlour. Though made over 13 years, between 2007 and 2020, it’s remarkable how little Hawkesworth’s style has deviated. He still favours the unusual closeup – perhaps a hangover from the year he spent photographing reconstructed crime scenes before trading in a forensic science degree for photography. There are two such pictures here: the camera closing in on the face of a woman bathed in sunlight, eyes closed behind tinted glasses, skin puckered by fine lines; and an unusual crop of a man’s face caught in profile, which gives only clues – the torn collar of his shirt, a few dots of paint on a faded baseball cap. His lips are stretched into a half smile, making the texture of recently shorn facial hair catch in the light.
Like Martin Parr, Hawkesworth favours a bracing British coastal view. Here, two young men, one whose arm is already bandaged from some previous misadventure, perform a backflip off a stack of mattresses piled up outside a red brick house, lace net curtains in the windows. A Victorian-style pram stands motionless, laden with bags of candy floss. A girl sucking a lollipop texts on her phone.
Hawkesworth’s perspective on British culture is thick with nostalgia at times – a lavish landscape shot shows a small, solitary figure traversing a wind-swept, sepia-toned field, a factory puffing out smoke on the horizon. Like Parr, August Sander or Paul Strand, Hawkesworth shares a romantic view of labour and the working class, but his images never get as gritty or direct as theirs. They’re cleaner, more palatable visions of a very familiar place.
The British Isles is intended as a roving study, an alternative chronicle of life in Britain at a turbulent time. This selection suggests that Hawkesworth was actually searching for stability and consistency, for succinct expressions of a quintessentially British person or landscape – responding more to the history of painting and photography than austerity and Brexit.
There’s another mode Hawkesworth does compellingly: charged, cinematic scenes, which are sumptuously smooth – a quality made more salient by the C-type print (Hawkesworth does all his prints himself). He has a knack for finding dramatic topographical ways of depicting the UK, finding architectonic lines in the everyday. A garden shed is shot from just behind a picket fence, nestled against a grey, pebbledash exterior. An abstract image of an oily puddle on the road becomes the centre of a geometric composition. An empty bench looks out to sea in straight-backed silence, shadows animating the image as time passes.
This one feels like an invitation to step into the frame – not to look at Britain but to look from it. This is a work fundamentally not about the British Isles but about visions of Britishness, how being in this place shapes how we see it, and beyond it. There is only one oddity that feels totally un-British: in every single picture, the sun is shining.
• At Huxley-Parlour, Maddox Street, London, until 10 August
